Catherine the Great

“ Already she displayed those feline graces which nothing, not even captivity nor the sight of her dreadful scaffold, could lessen. The two queens—one at the dawn, the other in the midsummer of life—presented at this moment the utmost contrast. Catherine was an imposing queen, an impenetrable widow, without other passion than that of power. Mary was a light-hearted, careless bride, making playthings of her triple crowns. One foreboded great evils,—foreseeing the assassination of the Guises as the only means of suppressing enemies who were resolved to rise above the Throne and the Parliament ”

“ Catherine was, therefore at once satisfied and fasting; deprived of all exteriorly, but abundantly nourished in the interior; thirsty in her body, but inundated in her soul, by torrents of living waters, and always when necessary strong and joyous. But the old and tortuous serpent could not endure such a great favor from Heaven, without seeking to empoison it with the venom of envy. He excited against the servant of God, on the occasion of her extraordinary fast, all those who knew her, whether laymen or Religious. ”

“ She was known as Catherine the Great, and is credited with having been the most infamous of women in all history. Catherine was succeeded by Paul, who was assassinated by his own courtiers when he was on the point of joining Napoleon Bonaparte in his conquest of India.
His son was Alexander I, who added Finland and Poland to Russia, and founded the Holy Alliance. He was followed by his son Nicholas, who ruled for 30 years, and crushed the Poles and Hungarians, but died of a broken heart in the Crimean War. ”

“ We thus get something of which the interesting cases of “doubleness of personality,” so much studied of late years, are, as it were, purely psychical, definitely maladif caricatures; the great difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing, at all times, the consciousness and memory of both sides, of both “selves,” and of each as both actual and potential, within the range of her one great personality. Indeed it is this very multiplicity thus englobed and utilized by that higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and sanctity. ”

“ Catherine was generous, -- all such ladies are:
Love, that great opener of the heart and all
The ways that lead there, be they near or far,
Above, below, by turnpikes great or small, --
Love (though she had a curséd taste for war,
And was not the best wife, unless we call
Such Clytemnestra, though perhaps 't is better
That one should die, than two drag on the fetter) --
LXXXI
Love had made Catherine make each lover's fortune,
Unlike our own half-chaste Elizabeth,
Whose avarice all disbursements did importune,
If history, the grand liar, ever saith
The truth ”

“ In the beginning of her visions, Catherine related to her Confessors, that our Lord appeared to her, while she was meditating and said to her: " Know, my daughter, what you are and what I am; if you learn these two things, you shalt be truly blest: you are what is not, and I am the great I Am; if thy soul is deeply penetrated with this truth, the enemy cannot deceive you and you will avoid all his snares; you will never consent to do any thing against my commandments, and you will acquire without difficulty, grace, truth and peace." ”

“ Catherine at Avignon, pleading this great cause in the frivolous culture and dainty pomp of the place; Catherine at Rome, defending to her last breath the legal rights of a Pope whom she could hardly have honoured, and whose claims she saw defended by extremely doubtful means—is a figure as pathetic as heroic. Few sorrows are keener than to work with all one's energies to attain a visible end for the sake of a spiritual result, and, attaining that end, to find the result as far as ever. This sorrow was Catherine's. ”

“ Catherine II., though a voluptuous Princess, was a great Sovereign, and a competent judge of merit; and it was her unbiased choice that seated Count Woronzoff, while yet young, in her councils. Though the intrigues of favourites have sometimes removed him, he always retired with the esteem of his Sovereign, and was recalled without caballing or cringing to return. He is admired by all who have the honour of approaching him, as much for his obliging condescension as for his great information. ”

“ In these days, when we are all reduced to one apparent level of moral respectability, and great saintliness and dramatic guilt are alike seldom conspicuous, we forget the violent contrasts of the middle ages. Pure "Religious," striving after the exalted perfection enjoined by the Counsels, moved habitually among moral atrocities, and bold vigour of speech was a practical duty. Catherine handled without evasion the grossest evils of her time, and the spell which she exercised by simple force of direct dealing was nothing less than extraordinary. ”

“ She cared little to render homage to a most Christian king who disregarded the precepts of Christianity; or to be sullied by homage from a monarch, which could not be rendered without insult to a virtuous woman. Young Catherine preferred, in the summer eve, to lie under the shadow of her father’s trees, which once reared a world of leafy splendor on the spot now occupied by the Palais Royal. There she read [Pg 267] works coined by great minds. ”

“ Catherine was not only a woman, but a foreigner, a captive, and a second wife, scarcely to be considered as a wife at all. Many were the protests against a decision which excluded from the throne the grandson of Peter the Great, and certain of the raskolniks submitted to the torture rather than swear allegiance to a woman. ”

“ One of the grand-daughters of Catherine, Lady Jane Beaufort, had the singular fortune of becoming at once the inspiration and the love of a great poet, the queen of an accomplished monarch, and the common ancestress of all the sovereigns of England since the days of Elizabeth. ”

“ We may see by what happens in our own day how history is falsified at the very moment when events happen.
Catherine, who had founded great hopes on the age of her rival, tried more than once to overthrow her. It was a dumb, underhand, terrible struggle. The day came when Catherine believed herself for a moment on the verge of success. In 1554, Diane, who was ill, begged the king to go to Saint-Germain and leave her for a short time until she recovered. ”

“ Two great ideals of unity—one Roman, one Christian in origin—had possessed the middle ages. In the strength of them the wandering barbaric hordes had been reduced to order, and Western Europe had been trained into some perception of human fellowship. Of these two unifying forces, the imperialistic ideal was moribund in Catherine's time: not even a Dante, born fifty years after his true date, could have held to it. Remained the ideal of the Church universal, and to this last hope of a peaceful commonwealth that should include all humanity, the idealists clung in desperation. ”

“ As no one except Catherine, was capable of continuing these cares, she attributed her perseverance to a species of pride, in desiring to do more than others; and as hatred easily believes evil of those that it pursues, this wretched woman, more diseased in mind than body, listened to the devil to such a degree, as at last to suspect Catherine's purity, and to believe that she was committing some great sin, when she was absent. ”

“ Catherine's first impulse is to bid the friends at home rejoice with her in news great in itself, and greater because it may clear the way for the realization of wider hopes. It is noteworthy that the instant the end for which she has long been straining is achieved, her loyal and aspiring spirit reverts to her old dreams, and summons her companions to resume prayer for a Crusade. ”

“ And he commanded Catherine to be taken into the palace and strictly guarded, because he marvelled at the great wisdom and the wonderful beauty of this virgin. He summoned fifty doctors well versed in the knowledge of the Egyptians and the liberal arts; and, when they were gathered together, he said unto them: "A maiden of subtle mind maintains that our gods are but demons. ”

“ During the reign of Francis, Catherine exercised no influence in France. She was young, a foreigner, a member of a state that had almost no weight in the great world of politics, had not given any proof of great ability, and was thrown into the shade by more important persons. For ten years after her marriage she had no children. In consequence, a divorce began to be talked of at court; and it seemed not impossible that Francis, alarmed at the possible extinction of the royal house, might listen to such a proposal. But Catherine had the happiness of bringing him grandchildren ere he died. ”

“ Catherine was a young woman when she went into exile; she remained until she was old and her hairs were gray before her term of punishment ended. She had been in exile more than twenty years and in all that time she had not seen one of her relatives or heard the voice of a friend. At last she was set free.
When she arrived at her former home she spent several months in making visits to relatives, and once again entered the work of the revolutionists. She was now famous in their circles and known to great numbers of peasants who loved her dearly and called her "Grandmother." ”

“ EDSTASTON [shouting] . Claire, loosen these straps, in Heaven's name. Quick.
CLAIRE [seeing him and throwing herself on her knees at his side] . Oh, how dare they tie you up like th at! [To Catherine.] You wicked wretch! You Russian savage! [She pounces on the straps, and begins unbuckling them.]
CATHERINE [conquering herself with a mighty effort] . Now self-control. Self-control, Catherine. Philosophy. Europe is looking on. [She forces herself to sit down.]
EDSTASTON. Steady, dearest: it is the Empress. Call her your Imperial Majesty. ”

“ To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father’s great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that Catherine’s own mind ceased to follow them. ”

“ And of her social affections, as manifested in her great colloquies with her friends, Catherine now says, “All other loves” than the direct love of God “now appear to me as worse than sheer self-loves.”—“She began to confess her sins with so great a contrition that it appeared a wonderful thing,” we are told of Catherine, in 1499-1510; yet we know, from the unimpeachable testimony of Don Marabotto himself, that “the wonderful thing” about these latter Confessions was precisely the absence of that former keen sense of, and sorrow for, specific sins. ”

“ The sources are, it is true, at first sight, fairly abundant,—altogether about one hundred of the two hundred and eighty pages of the Vita ed Opere. But four peculiarities render their utilization a matter of much labour and caution.
For one thing, they certainly include no piece written by herself, and probably none written down before 1497. Catherine’s memory can no doubt be trusted, and with it much of the oldest version of those great turning-points of her inner life which occurred long before that date, and which she thus, later on, communicated to her two closest friends. ”

“ St. Catherine, Moro’s fellow God-parent, had expressed herself, in certain moods, in so rigoristic a sense on these deep matters, as to invite the comment of the Bollandist Sticker that these passages are caute legenda. [336] Yet Catherine, in speaking thus, simply resembled probably all her really earnest contemporaries—witness the great Paris Chancellor Jean Gerson, some time before, and the devoted Cardinals Contarini and Morone and Vittoria Colonna, a little after Catherine’s own zenith. [337]
Again, the practical, moral abuses were most real and often very pressing ”

“ Her husband became more and more aggressive in his threats. He spoke openly, among his intimates, of his intention to imprison Catherine in a convent and to marry his mistress, Elizabeth Woronzow, and branded the son whom Catherine had borne to him, as a bastard, who would be excluded from the succession. It was therefore in self-defence that Catherine surrounded herself with men of power and influence. She entered into close relations with high officers of the Russian army, who still adhered with loyal devotion to the traditions of Peter the Great and Elizabeth ”

“ No domestic life could in all its relations have been more perfect, and her love of children amounted to a passion. Among the great female rulers it would be difficult to find one less like Queen Victoria than the Empress Catherine of Russia, but they had this common trait of an intense love of children and a great power of winning their affection. There is a charming letter of Catherine to Grimm, describing her life among her grandchildren, which might almost have been written by the English Queen. ”

“ TO THE VENERABLE RELIGIOUS, BROTHER ANTONIO OF NIZZA, OF THE ORDER OF THE HERMIT BROTHERS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE AT THE WOOD OF THE LAKE It is in her letters to persons leading the dedicated life that one can most clearly study Catherine's own inner experience. When warning and consoling them, she is speaking to herself. This obscure girl had a way of writing to the great of this earth—and indeed to the very Fathers of Christendom—with the straightforward simplicity of a teacher instructing childish minds in the evident rudiments of virtue. ”